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This year, 2014, marks the sixtieth anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education and the twenty-fifth anniversary of the filing of Sheff v. O’Neill, two landmark cases brought by LDF aimed at eliminating segregation in education. In 1954, the United States Supreme Court issued its sweeping decision in Brown, in which LDF successfully argued that state-enforced racial segregation in public schools is “inherently unequal.” In 1989, continuing in the tradition of Brown, LDF, alongside co-counsel the American Civil Liberties Union, the Connecticut Civil Liberties Union, attorney Wesley Horton, and others, filed the Sheff complainton behalf of students in Hartford, Connecticut public schools who were being denied an education equal to that of their counterparts in suburban school districts due to segregation and economic disparities between Hartford schools and those in the nearby suburbs.

In July 1996, the Connecticut Supreme Court found that Hartford schools were in fact racially, ethnically, and economically isolated, in contravention of Connecticut’s affirmative constitutional obligation to provide all schoolchildren with racially integrated and substantially equal educational opportunities. While the State had never intentionally segregated the students in its public school system, the Court ordered the State to immediately correct Hartford’s de facto segregation by remedying the racial isolation endemic to schools in the area around the state capital.

Nearly two decades after the Sheff decision, the efforts of LDF, co-counsel, and the plaintiffs to enforce the remedy are beginning to bear fruit. As part of the Sheff remedy, the State established a voluntary integration program and a cohort of desegregated educational opportunities. A recent analysis of the programs shows that, by the end of this year, 44% of Hartford’s students of color, about 9,000 students, will be attending racially and economically integrated schools. Nearly 20,000 children across 22 school districts in the greater Hartford-area are being served by the voluntary integration program. Also rising is the number of innovative, nationally recognized, award-winning regional magnet schools that help to free students from racial isolation and poverty. To date, there are 39 Sheff-created magnet schools, with more magnet schools planned for the coming years.

The quality, integrated educational benefits remedying the state constitutional violations identified in the Sheff decision are having a demonstrable and lasting impact on student achievement. Indeed, children attending Sheff-related schools are outperforming their counterparts in Hartford school and performing extremely well in relation to all other Connecticut students. Meanwhile, graduation rates of Hartford students attending the magnet high schools exceed the rates of many suburban high schools. Further, research demonstrates that students attending integrated schools also will develop better critical thinking and analytical skills, and that diverse schools are better than high-poverty schools at counteracting the negative effects of poverty.